Netflix open sourced the code to Janitor Monkey, a tool it uses to automate the deletion of unused Amazon Web Services resources. It’s easy to spin up cloud compute instances, but not so easy to shut them down as they fall into disuse.

The search giant keeps pushing its public cloud infrastructure, this time by updating its Cloud SQL database service with more storage, bigger caches for faster reads, and a choice of data center locales, according to a Google Enterprise blog post.

Netflix is putting Edda, aka Entrypoints, its tool for rapidly querying and reporting on Amazon Web Services resources, onto Github so other AWS customers can apply it to their own workloads, according to a company blog post.

Newvem is bringing its Amazon Web Services analytics to CIOs and IT managers via a shiny new iOS app that will let CIOs use their beloved iPads and iPhones to keep tabs on Amazon cloud services in use.

Morgridge Institute ran Cycle Computing software atop Amazon Web Services to build a cell knowledge base that, over time, could help doctors build the tissue types they need to resarch and cure disease in a petri dish.

Amazon has added a new cloud offering dubbed Glacier, where for less than a penny per gigabyte per month users can store files that aren’t accessed very often. The new product could put the hurt on backup and recovery offerings from other vendors.

Very few companies know how to scale and deploy cloud applications like Netflix(s nflx), the ginormous movie streaming site. And now it’s making its Asgard management console available to the open source community.

Google take notice: Amazon Web Services is now pushing a “fully managed search service” for web or mobile app developers. CloudSearch promises to ease the provisioning headaches of web developers who need to build search into their commerce or other sites.

Adding T-Mobile support to the iPhone may sound simple, but it’s a much more difficult task than it appears. New bands don’t just necessitate new antennas, but a complete phone redesign. T-Mobile’s Apple moment may come with the iPhone 5, but don’t hold your breath.

Straight on the heels of introducing a new feature that could cut cloud-based encoding time in half, Encoding.com has raised a Series B round of financing worth $2 million. The funding comes just a week after competitor Zencoder also raised a $2 million funding round.

Heading into the new year, there are a lot of questions, including whether Netflix is a friend of open source and whether Facebook will build more data centers. In some cases, such as Apple move into cloud services, the only question remaining is “when?”.

Amazon is looking to add a new cloud encoding service to its web services portfolio. While creating the new encoding service would fit neatly into its AWS plans, it could also potentially displace some customers who rely on its infrastructure for their own cloud encoding services.

As important as cloud computing is for startups and random, one-off projects at big companies, it still has a long way to go before it can prove its chops. So let’s turn down the noise level and add a dose of reality. Here are 10 reasons enterprises aren’t ready to trust the cloud.

SimpleDB is hugely disruptive. Sure, it will take some time to evolve the new thinking patterns and new design disciplines that this technology forces us to consider. To do so, consider this breakdown of the similarities and differences between SimpleDB and conventional relational databases.